Interpretivism

• reject use of natural science methods - fundamental differences between science and sociology

  sociology studies humans who are not passive and have autonomy so cannot be studied in the same way that objects are - we choose how we act
• people make decisions based on the way they interpret the world around them and the meanings that they attach to things - sociologists should aim to uncover these internal meanings

  subjective opinions are interesting, sociology deals with social constructions rather than external "social facts"

  feminists - science is malestream

  postmodernists - science is a metanarrative
• Jack Douglas (1967)


  reject positivist idea of external social facts determining our behaviour - individuals have free will and they choose how to act on the basis of meaning

  to understand suicide we must uncover its meanings for those involved instead of imposing our own meanings onto the situation - rejects Durkheim
• Douglas also rejects Durkheim's use of quantitative data from official statistics - they're not objective facts, simply social constructions resulting from the way coroners label certain deaths as suicide - Douglas proposes we use qualitative data from case studies of suicides to reveal the actors' meanings and give us a better idea of the real rate of suicide than the official statistics
• J. Maxwell Atkinson (1978) - ethnomethodologist


  like Douglas, rejects the idea that external social facts determine behaviour and agrees that statistics are socially constructed

  unlike Douglas, Atkinson argues that we can never know the 'real rate' of suicide, even using qualitative methods, since we can never know for sure what meanings the deceased hels

  the only thing we can study about suicide is the way that the living make sense of deaths - the interpretive procedures coroners use to classify deaths, for ethnomethodologists